Roll Your Own Search Engine

Use a human to mediate the resuls.
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/09/rollyo_roll_your_own_search_en.html

Ruby on Rails (RoR) :: The Unofficial FAQ

In honor of the release of Ruby on Rails 1.0, I have provided a brief FAQ.

Is RoR a transformation technology?
or Is RoR a social movement?

Yes.

RoR brings simplicity to the LAMP/XAMP stack.
RoR helps developers focuses on domain problems, not technology. [ If you are in business, your domain is your business. If you are a neuroscientist, neurons are your domain. If you are an architect, buildings, doors, and windows are your domain.]
RoR is a portable foundation (Windows/Linux/OS/X) for building internet applications significantly simpler than is common with conventional (Java, .Net, and even LAMP) tools. Its creeping into many projects and companies to augment or replace those tools.
At this point things are a bit weird, because not everyone is talking about how they are multiplying the productivity of their developers.
Can you think of any companies that might not want to brag about their progress to their competitors?

What is a Ruby and who needs one on a rail road track?
The Ruby we are talking about here is a programming language, a beautiful programming language, like its name sake is a beautiful piece of gravel. Ruby has characteristics [objects, closures/blocks, iterators] that make it easy to write short, clear, programs -- largely because they make it easy to write programs about programs, objects, and functions. The Rails parts comes in because all that power means it can be hard to do simple things in a simple way. RoR is a set of conventions, with supporting tools, that help programmers do simply things simply; even better, its easy for RoR programmers do things in the same simple way.

IBM, Open Standards, and OpenDoc

briefly

The Beauty of Simplicity :: Google and More

Linda Tischler has an interesting article on Fast Company's site :: The Beauty of Simplicity.
A significant portion covers work by Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products, but there is much more -- interesting views from Royal Philips, MIT's Media Lab, Intuit, etc.
Business Models
Rather than simply focusing on technology of human interaction, Tischler reports on the connection between a companies business model, the simplicity of its UI design, and the ability of customers to understand the business. The report from Phillips is especially interesting.

Yellow Machine :: cheap terrabyte

Anthology's Yellow Machine looks like a nice solution for anyone with 400 - 1200 gigs of images. Cheap ($1,200) too!

Crystal Reports for Eclipse

Crystal Reports for Eclipse will be released in Q4 2005.
In addition to an eclipse based application, an embded version will be available. This will allow tight integration with any application based upon the eclipse plug-in architecture.
Who cares?
Anyone who wants to place powerful reporting contol into the hands of a specific class of end users:

• Physicians
• Archiects
• Building Contractors
• Project Managers
• etc.

Open Question:
Will Crystal Reports for Eclipse support reports based upon POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects) or just relational tables? The answer is probably no. For that BIRT or Jasper Reports is probably required.
Therefore, although Crystal Reports will probably be less powerful than BIRT or Jasper in terms of data it can report on, but it's raw reporting power is impressive and -- often more important -- its tools are familiar to a wide range of power users and desktop level developers.

eclipse collaboration in 2005

Check out Ward's map of eclipse committers.

[A 'committer' in open source projects is someone with the right to alter the code base without additional authorization. The committer rights are tied to the individual, not the company she/he works for. A developer gets committer rights from the existing committers, not from any company.
At eclipse.org, two committers are elected to the board of directors. They have voting rights equal to representatives from sponsoring organizations like Oracle, SAP, IBM, Borland, Sybase, etc. who put in up to $250,000 per year, depending upon their revenues.]

Wipe That Card

Don't loose your hotel room card. As this Computerworld story reports, they often contain name, address, and credit card information in readable form. Of course, if some one finds your card, they will have to spend $39 to read it.

Lattix LDM for Eclipse :: Revit for Software

Neeraj Sangal was the brains behind StructureBuilder, an interesting tool from WebGain that did not ever get the attention it deserved. He has a new company and a new, for software, type of tool based on DSMs (Dependency Structure Matrix) and popularized by MIT's Sloan School during the 90s when they were applied at a number of large companies such as Intel and Boeing to analyze their complex work flows and organizations.

Lattix LDM is not the type of tool that normally interests me, but I liked so much about StructureBuilder that it will be hard to avoid taking a look at this.

Lattix LDM is, more or less, Revit structural for software.

XFORMS -- Then and Now

Micah Dubinko's Ten Favorite XForms Engines summarized the landscape two years ago. This spring he summarized his current favorites.

A more complete summary of current work is available from W3C.

XForms can help pretty much any application surrounding using html forms, but its value is much broader because for message and document centric applications, it provides a nice fit for many problem domains such as B2B and catalog workshop. It would probably be a nice foundation for a set of product (as in software product) configuration tools -- Spring, Cocoon/Leyna, JBoss, Tomcat, Hibernate, JLibrary, etc.

From an application developer's standpoint it allows a combination of workflow support with rich data -- including a persistent form of object graphs.

Form Faces is an especially interesting implementation because it offers platform independent XForms and thereby avoids the standard Microsoft end run around standards -- Infopath.

Summary of a technical presentation of an XForms use:

The difficulty of developing and deploying commercial web applications increases as the number of technologies they use increases and as the interactions between these technologies become more complex. This paper describes a way to avoid this increasing complexity by re-examining the basic requirements of web applications. Our approach is to first separate client concerns from server concerns, and then to reduce the interaction between client and server to its most elemental: parameter passing. We define a simplified programming model for form-based web applications and we use XForms and a subset of J2EE as enabling technologies. We describe our implementation of an MVC-based application builder for this model, which automatically generates the code needed to marshal input and output data between clients and servers. This marshalling uses type checking and other forms of validation on both clients and servers. We also show how our programming model and application builder support the customization of web applications for different execution targets, including, for example, different client devices.

[Using XForms to Simplify Web Programming, by Richard Cardone, Danny Soroker, Alpana Tiwari of the IBM Watson Research Center. Available from the ACM Portal

A few implementations...

• Form Faces is based upon pure JavaScript providing platform independent XForms and thereby avoids the standard Microsoft end run around standards -- Infopath.
• Chiba is a java/xlst based server engine that works with existing browsers. Distributions exist for tight integration with Cocoon, . The Chiba Cookbook is especially interesting, because the designers intent and basic usage patterns are explained clearly.
• Deng is an XForms browser implemented in Macromedia's Flash/ActionScript.
• X-Smiles is an entire Java based browser supporting XForms and other emerging W3C technology. While it supports browsing on conventional devices, its orientation is toward exotic devices.
• Manifest is an xml based content management system ,supporting XForms through a Chiba integration. It uses MS Office products to generate the content, transforming it to XML suitable for a Chiba-enabled Java application server. The balance between the familiarity of Office and the power of an open back end is appealing. Can CSS page designers do enough customization for great layout? Probably, especially if it is possible to capture the XML into a Cocoon style pipeline at some point.
  

Usability and open source

Interesting intersection -- read about the birth of a movement

Picasa2, Hello, and Blogger + Atom

Picasa2, Hello, and Blogger work together. Be sure to read the note at the botom of this post on use of Atom.

Here is a simple way to get started:

1. Decide where you want to put your photos on your computer. It is much easier if you can work off your hard disk than if you work off a CD. Copy your CDs to your computer. If you don't have room, just start the process with one cd.
2. Download and install Picasa2 and Hello. http://picasa.google.com/index.html will do the trick. You may want to browse around the picasa site, but there is no real need. There is on concept that is new to most people: you will be able to create multiple photo albums, but that does not require creating many copies of the photos.
3. Start up Picasa2 and let it find your photos.
4. Create your Blogger account.http://www.blogger.com/start
   • create an account
   • name your blog
   • choose a template
   • make a post or two (you can delete them later) to see how it works & make sure it is set up correctly. Don't agonize a long time about your template, you can change it later. You will be able to create many separate blogs. You might want your first to have a family oriented name and use it to focus on family issues, contacts, conversations, etc.
5. Start up Hello
   • chose 'send photos'
   • choose 'use picasa2'
   • select a photo
   • Hello will ask you to give it a caption
   • Hello will publish it to your blog

A suggestion. You don't really want to simply publish all the photos. Instead select photos of interest, give them a caption (which might be something like: does anyone know who this is?). Blogger will let people comment on your postings. Send email to family members asking them to comment, clarify, etc.

Hello will also let you chat with others who are online, share photos with them, etc. If you want one place on line to store all the photos so that others can get all of them without using CDs.

Using Atom:

1. From your Blogger dashboard, select 'settings' and then select 'site feed'.
2. Enable Atom.
3. Make a note of the URL for your Atom feed.
4. Download, and have potential collaborators download, an RSS aggrigator like RSSOwl.
5. Let people know your atom feed URL.
6. If they use RSSOwl and subscribe to your feed, they will get all your posts. Of course, they will probably want to subscribe to many other feeds as well. Mother Jones, the NYT, etc come to mind.

This concept takes a bit of time to grok, but soon you will see why most of email is really a waste. Instead post and subscribe.

Subversive Notes

Subversion
Subversion is a recent addition to a class of software called Source Code Management Systems. (SCCM). Inclusion of SCCM was one of the decisions that early Unix developers made which changed the industry 30 years ago.
Karl Fogel
Karl is the founder of Subversion. In this interview he talks about SCCM, open source, motivating developers, etc.
CollabNet
CollabNet develops open source software with an emphasis on tools for collaboration in all phases of the software life cycle.

Google vs. Google

Maps vs. Earth
Google maps and google earth use somewhat different technology. Both share a spirit of taking the web experience past the dumb page behavior of the past 10 years.
Rasmussen
Lars Rasmussen, creator of google maps, outlined the new realities in a presentation this week.Its interesting that the underlying issues are quite similar to desktop portability issues:
On the desktop the contention has been over the use of native widgets vs the use of portable widget libraries. In the Java world this plays out as SWT (native widgets) vs Swing (portable widgets).
Native vs. Portable
Google maps takes the former approach -- they must use the native (IE approach) for drawing lines on IE, but use another approach in Firefox.
The key thing is they don't design for the lowest common denominator, they design for the user experience.

Microformats

Microformats -- small but working '...open standards specifications...' for a few important aspects of page design and construction.

• outlines
• calendars
• contact information
  
• etc.

Jef Poskazner has Spam Issues

Jef Poskazner gets about 1 million spams per day.
Jef Poskazner has no spam in his in box, because he has spam control on steroids.
Check it out.

Tim O'Reilly on Zorn, Macromedia, and Eclipse

Macromedia's announcement that their next generation enterprise Flash development tool, code-named Zorn, will be built on top of Eclipse, is a watershed moment both for Macromedia and for the open source movement. Macromedia's choice of Eclipse speaks volumes about the impact of open source on commercial software development -- and about Macromedia's commitment to making Flash into an essential platform for next-generation internet applications.
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/06/nextgen_macrome.html

O'Reilly adds a most interesting side note:

A side note that may be of interest: the project lead for Zorn is none other than Mark Anders, one of the two original developers of ASP.Net at Microsoft, and long-time program manager for the product. Mark told me that he joined Macromedia because he felt there was a need for a real enterprise level development tool for Flash. That it was the developer of a key Microsoft product who made the choice to build on Eclipse may be particularly telling.

Macromedia, Eclipse, Adobe, Flash

Lots of news on these fonts lately.

• Flash 8 announcements
  include new Maelstrom platform, which is attracting some heavyweights like SAP.
  
• Macromedia to use Eclipse as platform for next generation Flash development -- the probably means Flex support as well.
• Macromedia and Adobe are one, consolidating two powerhouses in real content and valuable, visually strong applications.
  

Orangevolt :: Ant Tasks

Orangevold Ant Tasks 1.3 has a bunch of stuff for os interoperation -- things like access to kde, windows hive, etc.

Mobile 3G/WiFi Router Project

Put briefly, it's a WWAN (Wireless Wide Area Network) router. In more human terms, it's a compact little box that gets data from cellular towers and re-shares it for multiple computers to use.

To use it all you do is plug it in to the cigarette lighter of a car (or a 12v supply when at home). It automatically boots up and links in to Verizon's "Broadband Access" service, turning itself into an access point. Turn on your laptop, join the network and voila -- you're on the net! It's just like using a hotspot (such as they have at Starbucks and airports), but it goes anywhere you car goes.

--Tor Amundson

Read all about it...

http://moro.fbrtech.com/~tora/EVDO/index.html

Shuttle :: All Quiet on the Western Front

I just picked up & set up my new Shuttle. The scoop:

• I wanted a quiet machine
• I wanted a 64-bit AMD processor
• I wanted a small machine
• I wanted a near portable, but something something without all the compromises of a laptop -- especially support for a good monitor & keyboard; something suiable for taking to a conference or vacation
• I wanted great graphics --- perhaps for a game, but more likely for...
• rapid photo processing
• Revit use
• CAD/CAM use

I could have ordered the machine on line, but instead I spend a tiny bit more and had a local shop build it -- they build a lot of Shuttles for the gaming market. Good decision; they were fast & now I have some local experts who have a stake in keeping my machine happy.

Price is a fraction of the price of a comporable, but bigger and louder, machine from HP or (ugh) Dell. Better yet, all the components are name components & the system is designed as a system -- its not a bucket holding whatever components happend to have the best prices the week I ordered.

Of course, I'd not be quite so happy if I'd not also picked up a nice Eizo monitor to complement the Shuttle.

XAMP

Is XAMP a good starting point for LAMP/eclipse integration

Hugunin speaks at PyCon DC 2005

PyCon DC 2005 was held March 23-25, 2005.
Jim Hugunin, one of the key developers of AspectJ, is now at Microsoft working on dynamic languages for the CLR. His blog indicates he is hiring: one developer. A little slower than I'd like!
Clearly it would be cool to have one solid implementation of a dynamic language that ran on both the CLR and JVM.
Just what is the status of Python on the JVM? Perhaps Jython is closer than I think. DevX has a nice article on unit testing Jython under eclipse, although some aspects of his development environment are a bit murky.
Where is the eclipse version of Hugunin?

Fade in; fade out with javascript

Interesting effects. Useful?

Shape Editor in GEF

While far to simple for a 'real' application, this shape editor could be the foundation of a nice user interface for many applications.
Perhaps more important, it illustrates how eclipse's GEF and EMF connect to each other and the power of eclipse's ecore for application development.

topic maps on xml.com

Lars Marius Garshol has a useful intro to Topic Maps on xml.com. Naturally one does not expect a Ruby implementation on xml.com! Get ready for the dreaded "" forrest.